Chilly. I’ll check to see what the overnight low was, but I don’t think it will be freezing. It was a beautiful sunny clear day yesterday, which made the chill tolerable. I hope for some more sun today.
Got the electrical done, and the RV hooked up to power water and sewer. We’re just putting grey water in the mystery sewer line, not black. We’ll see if it fills up or if I’ve got an undocumented septic system for the RV pad. I suspect a septic system, or at least a buried tank. The previous owner put it in for his fifth wheel trailer…
Full moon and patchy clouds meant no good stars last night, even though the air was pretty clear.
Today I’ll be chilling with our guests, and maybe getting some more cleanup stuff done. I want to edge and blow the yard and weeds, and finish cleaning up some of the leftover building material that has been just stacking up under the carport. There are other things on the list too. There always are.
I might even bait the crawdad traps and get them in the lake. It’s the season. Lake is half a foot high, the rain must be working its way down the watershed.
Oh, I have cupcakes and cards for the girls for Valentine’s Day. Happy Feast of St. Valentine everyone. Eat some pink icing on some baked goods!
The heater worked well in the garage and I’m very glad I took the time to install it. I’m finally pulling stuff off the stacks. Gas line and a heater, electrical boxes and outlets, drinking water hose… and food.
I like to eat, and I like to be warm. Stacks are helping with both.
Stack some of your own…
nick
That’s a brave experiment! Good luck.
Remember all, tomorrow is cheap chocolate day!
Prepper fail. I have no fancy Valentine’s gifts for W1, so I gave her an orchid. Will atone presently with crèpes…
Belated happy birthday wishes, Mr Ray. Keep on circumnavigating the sun, in good health and spirits!
Dumb arses at the IRS. The money for my refund is sitting in a pending status in my account. The settlement date is for the 19th, a Wednesday. The CU will clear the transaction the day before, the same day as my SS deposit, also in a pending status.
The SS deposit is normal as SS sets pay dates for everyone, mine is the third Wednesday of every month. Why does the IRS place an effective date so far into the future? Stupid question as no one here knows the answer. The refund cleared in the three days, the actual posting makes it eight days for the refund. It may have something to do with the feds processing cycles for funds.
43F This am. Light overcast. Time for coffee.
n
I don’t know if this is related, but he Payroll department at the VA, primarily based here in Austin, has been ordered back to work in the office next week, apparently under orders from DOGE.
This change was so sudden that most of the department will be sitting at folding tables with matching chairs in a big room, squinting into their laptop screens rather than their usual multi-monitor setup.
All of the equipment which has been at employees’ homes since the pandemic, including the monitors, will be returned for processing and eventual reassignment on an “as needed” basis, the rest sold as surplus.
Other Executive Branch departments might be under similar orders.
wow, cool.
n
Well, yesterday’s gullywasher is done, back to bright and sunny. A whole 0.25″ of rain if WU is to be trusted. A one point late afternoon I’d estimate winds at 50mph, with the rain going sideways.
One and done storm tho, back to 35-65F for the next week.
Do you have an inspection camera? I’ve used one to find breaks in sewer lines, very inexpensive these days.
Some plumbing contractors will do it for free, but you have to hope they won’t drop a dime on you if things aren’t to code.
Unless you are a VA employee whose paycheck is late at the end of the month.
The government could default on the debt and the Defense Dept. payroll, including the VA, would still be met as part of the Constitutionally mandated payments out of incoming revenues.
Defense Dept. and interest on the debt first. Then everything else, including Social Security.
“BIG BREAKING: White House just officially banned AP from Oval Office and Air Force One”
https://therightscoop.com/big-breaking-white-house-just-officially-banned-ap-from-oval-office-and-air-force-one/
“The Associated Press has just been banned from both the Oval Office and Air Force One for their continued refusal to recognize the Gulf of America.”
I would have banned the AP on day one. They are a bunch of lying wannabe communists.
“’This is not acceptable’: German Defense Minister seethes at JD Vance’s call for Europe to bolster Western values”
https://humanevents.com/2025/02/14/this-is-not-acceptable-german-defense-minister-pushes-back-at-jd-vances-call-for-europe-to-bolster-western-values
“Vice President JD Vance’s impassioned speech in favor of western values, delivered in at the Munich Security Conference, in which he called out the threat of mass migration and the decline of democracy in Europe, ruffled a substantial number of feathers. German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said Vance’s remarks were “not acceptable.””
“Vance called out Germany and Sweden for the increased mass migration that has been remaking their populace, their laws, and their values even as asylum seekers stage terror attacks against European citizens. He blasted the decline in democratic norms as seen in Romania when a democratically run election for that nation’s leader was overturned because he was not the preferred choice of the EU elite. And Vance took issue with the free speech and censorship laws in the UK where praying silently outside of an abortion clinic, blocking no one, praying due to your of grief, is illegal.”
“In response, Pistorius said “I cannot just ignore what we heard before. I cannot not comment on the speech we heard by the US vice president. We fight for your right to be against us.””
Vance is doing well. This is the real telling truth to power.
Hat tip to:
https://thelibertydaily.com/
“Border Czar Referred AOC to the Deputy Attorney General”
https://www.independentsentinel.com/border-czar-referred-aoc-to-the-deputy-attorney-general/
“AOC is helping illegal aliens evade ICE, and she might be in trouble. Border Czar Tom Homan has referred her to the Deputy Attorney General. The office of Squad member Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., hosted a live webinar on Wednesday advising migrants in her district about their rights if they come face to face with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents looking to deport them, Fox News reports.”
Hmmm. There is a Free Speech issue here.
Oh, what the heck. Go for it and indict her.
“Time to Pull the Plug on “Environmental Justice””
https://www.city-journal.org/article/biden-environmental-justice-agenda-trump
“Biden’s agenda was really a way to funnel billions of dollars to progressive activist groups.”
“On his first day in office, President Trump signed an executive order rolling back DEI policies across the federal bureaucracy. Moving almost as quickly, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency investigators set off a firestorm by exposing the dubious spending priorities of USAID and other federal agencies. Now the White House is starting to dismantle the Biden administration’s vast “environmental justice” apparatus. Last week, Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lee Zeldin placed 160 employees in the agency’s Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights on paid leave. The move leaves “the environmental justice program at EPA on life support,” that office’s former deputy assistant administrator, Matthew Tejada, told NPR.”
It is past time. The bureaucrats are interfering with our food production and supply.
Who said winter was over ? My wife is calling this sprinter, hot, cold, hot, cold, etc.
We are going to have another hard freeze in South Texas next week. North Texas is looking at single digits. That is past Feb 15. If I was still the maintenance coordinator at TXU, I would be on pins and needles about taking down a coal burner today for a two week overhaul that I had scheduled a year ago.
I am driving up to Norman, Oklahoma in nine days. Hopefully this winter nonsense will be over by then. At least no ice please. I have driven through the Davis Hills at 10 F before, black ice is not fun. Especially with the 18 wheelers freewheeling down the hills.
And we have mosquito hawks flying all over the place. They are all going to get frozen next week.
“CNN: Media Elites Weigh Boycott of White House to Support AP’s Feud over ‘Gulf of America’”
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2025/02/14/cnn-media-elites-weigh-boycott-of-white-house-to-support-aps-feud-over-gulf-of-america/
““Nobody has the right to go into the Oval Office and ask the president of the United States questions,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Wednesday. “If we feel that there are lies being pushed by outlets in this room, we are going to hold those lies accountable.””
“CNN’s Brian Stelter, who falsely claimed Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation, wrote Friday that many of his media colleagues have suggested a “mass boycott” of White House coverage, allowing “Breitbart … to take their places””
I LOVE IT ! Bring in the podcasters !
“Disney Disaster: ‘Captain America: Brave New World’ Rotten Tomatoes Critics Score Among the Lowest Ever for Marvel Movie”
https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2025/02/14/disney-disaster-captain-america-brave-new-world-rotten-tomatoes-critics-score-among-the-lowest-ever-for-marvel-movie/
“This fourth stand-alone entry into the Captain America franchise started off on a bumpy road as star Anthony Mackie — who portrays Sam Wilson, who takes on the Captain America mantle fro the original Cappy, Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) — got himself in a bit of hot water by saying that Captain America should not represent America. He later walked that back.”
Captain Disaster ! I will pass.
Disney Marvel killed off Captain America and fired Agent Carter.
Haley Atwell works for Tom Cruise and Skydance now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ds2cHsEgCTE
Yo Ho! All hail the Return of the Blog!
Good to see, verily!
Great work Nick and Barbara !
I m baaaack
I thought, another good site vanish
thanks!!
I am so very sorry. I goofed. My inept computer skills and confusion over domain registration, hosting,email caused you guys to go down. In my defense I did call the GoDaddy help desk two weeks ago and that guy gave me bad information.
I will continue to pay for and host this site in Bob’s memory and promise all is well on this end with my responsibilities to keep things going.
This time had a help desk guy that knew what he was doing.
Hi Barbara, thank you very much ! And no worries, we are very grateful for the place to hang out.
Whew! Glad to see we’re back up.
Woot!
A BIG thank you to Barbara for her support and effort to fix this.
One quick note if you go over to her site – Ghost avatars from old still haunt the place.
(my old one from here popped back up – long time no see)
Good to see the site is back.
I was talking with a math teacher about Einstein’s famous formula; E=MC2
I was taught that exponentiation was always done first, then multiply and divide, left to right, followed by addition and subtraction left to right.
Is the correct formula E=M*(C2) or E=(M*C)2?
The latter would significantly increase the amount of energy over the former. Yes, I know multiplication is implied and the “*” is not necessary.
The answer from the math teacher is that constants are processed first when using exponentiation as it still remains a constant.
Is the correct formula E=M*(C2) or E=(M*C)2?
E = M * (C^2)
“Project Hail Mary: A Novel” by Andy Weir
https://www.amazon.com/Project-Hail-Mary-Andy-Weir/dp/0593135229?tag=ttgnet-20/
A standalone science fiction book, no prequel or sequel known. I reread (third or fourth time, not sure) the well printed and well bound trade paperback published by Ballantine Books in 2022 that I bought new on Amazon. I will continue to read all books by Andy Weir, this is my third book of his.
This is a story of love, desperation, betrayal, death, incredibly long loneliness, and great achievement. This is the story of Rocky and Grace, two people who never should have met. Please note that this is not a religious book.
This is not a hard science story as there is an amoeba like creature that can absorb light and turn it into mass and vice versa (E = mc^2).
And there are space aliens, three wildly different variants. Everything else is definitely hard science. Science rules !
I loved the spaceship “Hail Mary”. It just makes sense for the multiyear journey to Tau Ceti. And the spaceship is a transformer to provide a centrifuge for gravity when the engines were not firing, just cool.
MGM has bought the movie rights to the book for $3 million and Ryan Gosling has signed on as the main character Grace. The movie is due to be released in March 2026 to an estimated billion dollar plus box office like “The Martian”. I am not sure who the voice of “Rocky” will be.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/lord-millers-project-hail-mary-enlisting-martian-scribe-drew-goddard-1299338/
and
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12042730/
The author has a website at:
https://andyweirauthor.com/
My rating: 6 out of 5 stars
Amazon rating: 4.7 out of 5 stars (138,620 reviews)
Lynn
My wife and I are trying to figure out when to take our Social Security. The website
https://opensocialsecurity.com/
is telling us to:
Any idea if this is a good strategy ???
Order of precedence is why I went Kobyashi Maru to avoid being kicked out of GTE corporate trading back in the day.
Thankfully, in C, it would be
E = m * pow(c, 2)
Seems to be. Your wife will get half of yours, or hers, whichever is higher. There are lots of strategies, and opinions, on what is best. Some say take it as soon as possible due to uncertainty of SS. Others say wait to get the maximum.
The break even point of waiting until 70 for the maximum for a shorter time, or drawing early and less for longer time is about age 87. At least for my math that I did.
I know. But wondered why in my less than optimized cerebral wanderings at night.
The mnemonic for the mathematical order of operations is “Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally” – PEMDAS
P – Parentheses
E – Exponentiation
MD – Multiplication and Division. These are commutative, so the order doesn’t really matter.
AS – Addition & subtraction, also commutative.
That was a MAJOR topic when teaching Intermediate Excel.
C adds some really obscure things into the order chart, and the instructors at GTE, former high school math/science teachers who couldn’t really program, were determined to wash me out of the program.
I doubt they’ll ever figure out how I “changed the conditions of the test”.
On the subject of sticklers for detail, I spent the morning tearing through as much of “The Go Programming Language” as I could stomach.
Brian Kernigan is one of the co-authors of the book and the language. He gets revenge on all of you who believe in things like main should be formatted like this:
int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
….
return 0;
}
or return a value at the end.
In Go:
func main() { /* Strictly enforced bracket position */
….
}
While it is possible that main can return a value, the compiler will gripe if any of the code or imported modules call os.Exit() anywhere.
Oh, and functions exported from a module need to have the first letter capitalized.
Kernigan needs to retire.
In english Einstein’s formula is said Energy equals mass multiplied by the speed of light squared iirc which disambiguates that question. ie not Energy equals the square of mass multiplied by the speed of light.
But it’s all nerd talk to me….
n
Thanks again Barbara for everything you do to keep this place going.
If maintaining the site ever becomes difficult financially, please don’t hesitate to let us know.
@barbara, the links and difference between the name registrar, and site hosting, and possibly wordpress blog hosting are not obvious.
If I understand it the whole site is a wordpress site, and the /journal blog is another wordpress blog site inside of it… which adds another layer. There’s even more with www being a subdomain of the real site…
in other words, unless you are doing it all the time, all you can do is rely on your advisors… and sometimes they fail you.
I’m really glad it was straightforward to recover.
Thank you.
nick
I have a textbook left over from undergrad which goes into great detail about what the formula means and how it was derived if you are ever interested.
“Hello world” binary compiled with Go: 2,134,834 bytes.
Removing the debugging information: 1,392,792 bytes.
The same functionality compiled with C on Linux: 16,616 bytes.
Hot Skillz, tho.
Greg & Nick & Others; It should be patently obvious that I am NOT a programmer; barely more than a power user for most of the business applications like MS Office and Lotus Suite. But at that level, I was a pretty good instructor!
Testing 1, 2, 3